While most people focus on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org as being each other's competitors, there's a third player in this market: KOffice. While KOffice is obviously geared towards use on KDE, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME-based distributions as well, making it much more platform-independent than Microsoft's Office suite. Version 2.0.0 was released today, and comes with a whole boatload of improvements.

I know that both the kde-windows as well as the kde-mac people are investigating things like CPack to make standalone installers for those platforms of KDE software. But it is a hard problem that isn't solved yet. In fact, I don't think KOffice 2.0 has been packaged for Windows at all, although I have seen Patrick Spendrin make commits towards that goal.

But the kind of conceited hyperbole bornagainpenguin spews does a great injustice to the really great and hard work the kde-windows people have done. There are very few of them and they are doing great and pioneering work. Is the result perfect already? No. Can bornagainpenguin do any better? Unless he proves it, I'll assume he is incapable of doing that. Just as he is incapable of reading the KOffice 2.0 release announcement and understanding the target audience of this platform release.

And anyone who has ever had to package Windows software using an installer, whether bitrock, nsis or msi, knows that that is not an easy thing. Completely apart from the crt-problem, there are so many vagaries associated with making an installer that for larger software projects it's a full-time effort in itself.